The Cock Crows No More

This amusing post from Andrew Sullivan links to an unintentionally hilarious letter by a junior at Harvard, sent to the university’s student paper, the Harvard Crimson. An earlier article in the paper had decried the demolition of an enormous (and apparently quite realistic) snow-phallus some students had constructed during the recent aerial bombardment of the eastern seaboard. Now the letter’s author, one Amy Keel, has confessed that it was she who just couldn’t keep her hands off the penis.

The money quote here is the fantastic: “No one should have to be subjected to an erect penis without his or her express permission or consent.” Well “subjected” is such a loose term… if she means that I might be nonplussed should someone drape theirs over my shoulder without permission, that’s surely right. But according to Keel’s surreal reasoning, even the image of a penis is an “implied threat.” I guess the idea is that a public image of a penis sends the message that not merely the sight but the unwanted presence of the genuine article could be (ahem) thrust upon anyone in an equally uninvited fashion. Man, I never realized that all those public statues of bulls that appeared in New York City when I lived there were implicitly threatening me with goring. I should’ve sued Giuliani for harassment…

Keel praises her own bravery for destroying the “pornographic” sculpture, and writes that: “The only thing it did was create an uncomfortable environment for the women of Harvard University.” She means, of course, that it made her uncomfortable (apparently “the women of Harvard” have appointed her as their representative), and obviously, the proper response of civilized people to art that makes them uncomfortable is to destroy it.

My favorite line, near the end of the letter, is Keel’s humorless assertion that the sculpture’s “only purpose could be to assert male dominance.” Yup, you heard it here. When a bunch of college students (Keel assumes, without any apparent evidence, that they were male) decide to craft a frosty, lifelike dong, their only possible motive is the symbolic subjection of women, an iconic salvo in a never-ending gender war. It couldn’t be that they just, you know, thought it was funny.